Gingerbread Buche de Noel

This seemingly simple cake was quite a project! Thanks to Tuesdays with Dorie, I pushed myself to make this recipe (which I initially overlooked immediately after seeing it in Baking Chez Moi because it looked too complicated for me).  This cake turned out to be more fun to make than I thought!  There were 4 steps to this cake: 1) Praline; 2) Cake; 3) Filling; and 4) Frosting.

My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies (Dorie Greenspan)

Another day, another recipe. Today was a chocolate chip cookie kind of day, so I turned to Dorie Greenspan's book, "Baking From My Home to Yours." In it, she has a recipe called "My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies" which included a large photo of magnificent looking chocolate chip cookies. I was hoping my cookies would end up looking like those in the book, but it didn't.  Mine had more of a "French bake" to it.  I'll have to try this recipe again to see if I can get mine looking more like Dorie's.

Gougères

When I first saw this recipe in Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table, I immediately marked it as a "Must Try" recipe.  I had never made choux before, but I read recipes in different cookbooks and watched a few Youtube videos for demonstrations.  I realized that the ingredients and techniques are pretty much all the same. I most recently acquired a copy of Baking With Julia, and saw some pretty helpful hints on how to make choux, too, like making sure that your mixture of water, milk, butter, and salt are vigorous boil, and not just bubbling at the sides before adding flour to the mixture.  In the end, I was just amazed at how such simple ingredients can turn into something so fancy and delicious!

The Rugelach That Won Over France

Before I got Baking Chez Moi, I had never heard of Rugelach.  To be honest, I'm still not 100% sure if I'm pronouncing it right (is the "ch" silent?). What I do know is that The Rugelach That Won Over France is currently the recipe of the week on Tuesdays with Dorie! I compared this recipe in BCM with the Rugelach recipe in Dorie's Baking from My Home to Yours.  I decided to use the filling recipe in BCM and the technique in BFMHTY.

The "Everything" Cookie

This is a chocolate chip cookie that pretty much has everything you could possibly put into a chocolate chip cookie. Different types of sugar, different types of chocolate chips, oats, some nuts, and something extra to kick things up a notch, too.

World Peace Cookies

I saw the recipe for these World Peace Cookies all over the internet and had to try them for myself.  This recipe is the work of Pierre Herme and Dorie Greenspan. They know how to make a serious cookie! Dorie wrote in her book Baking From My Home To Yours, "When I included these in Paris Sweets, they were called Korova Cookies and they instantly won fans, among them my neighbor Richard Gold, who gave them their new name. Richard is convinced that a daily dose of Pierre's cookies is all that is needed to ensure planetary peace and happiness."